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Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

This project brilliantly points out that we are limited and shaped by how keys and layouts are presented to us.

What I don’t understand is why not go all the way. Why not also change the concept of what’s needed to enter a character? It would make sense that keys aren’t the ideal affordance to express a key every time.

Use a volume slider for a letter, use radio buttons, on/off toggles. What if I could draw the letter on my trackpad?

I hope this opens the door for a thriving ecosystem of expansions.

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> What if I could draw the letter on my trackpad?

I have been proposing to adapt Shorthand* to computer tactile input many times. Touchpads and touchscreens can use it. It seems faster and easier for both the computer and the person than having to recognize slow handwriting.

Secretaries used this for many decades, because it allowed them to record speech in real-time.

There is always a dismissive comment about how this is not a good idea for one reason or another, but I still think it would be a great feature to have.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand

> What if I could draw the letter on my trackpad?

The Apple Newton did that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton#Notes

That feels like Siri dictation, minus Siri, and minus the dictation

Also the palm, they called it graffiti. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_%28Palm_OS%29

(Google's gboard offers a handwriting keyboard, but it's on the touch screen and doesn't count. Also, it's not graffiti, so a bit more error prone. It does recognize joined-up handwriting though.)

There's also some keyboards on f-droid for braille text input and morse code input.

There were a couple of aftermarket systems for the Psion as well. Normally the keyboard was better, but writing on the screen turned out to be easier in a bumpy taxi.

The Apple Watch can do it today.

(In iMessage, as one easy example app, there's an entry box to send a new message. If you tap into that and get a keyboard click the keyboard icon in the bottom corner and there's a "moving finger" icon you can tap to get a trackpad to draw letters on. Older and smaller Watches won't even have the keyboard and will just have the trackpad.)

Heard of dasher ? https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/

I had the idea this week to use the Rocksmith USB adapter to develop a stenography system that allows me to control my computer using my guitars with chords, notes, and riffs.

There's a Rocksmith mod that allows you to control the menu using the guitar. Also, the Rocksmith USB cable is simply an ADC (with lower latency than most)

We're also limited and shaped by keyboards. Why only one letter per finger? The datahand does five!

Why are key switches only press?

What about analog partial key press? There are Hall effect keyboard switches that do that, I want to try some.

What about finger twist for input? I don't think anything exists? Would that be a volume knob on a key switch?

The CharaChorder [1] is one attempt to give a completely different shape to input methods

[1] : https://www.charachorder.com

> What about analog partial key press? There are Hall effect keyboard switches that do that, I want to try some.

That sounds fun, now I really want to try out a keyboard where half press is lowercase and full press is UPPERCASE! No more pinky strain from shift presses.

Some pipe organs have keyboards that support that. I can't figure out when it started, but my guess is the 1920s. No hall effect, they had mechanical contacts. (I've never got to play one and always wondered if you could feel when the two positions were hit or if you had to guess and rely on sound - organ pipes often have a long delays between when you press the key and when the speak)

A simple solution that would work on any keyboard (but will be much easier to do on a keyboard that supports custom layout and layers, e.g Ergodox) would be to send small letter of key is pressed under 0.5s (to be tested what value feels best) and capitalized if over this value. After a while it might feel natural to press quickly for a small letter and slightly longer for capitalized

The ZSA firmware fork of QMK does this! I don't have it enabled on my moonlander, but many of my friends do.

This is true. We’ve been so formatted by big keyboard that I never considered just the tip of my fingers. I hope you’ll make good use of our opposable thumbs in this new keyboard paradigm

I agree. I blew out my left arm for a year from too much typing, so I switched to kinesis style keyboards so I could put modifier keys under my thumbs. I dunno if your suggestion was meant to be serious, but it's still great.

It wasn’t, but the reason I like to explore absurd looking ideas is because of the serendipity that lateral thinking opens up. Thanks for exploring that!

What would be a cool use case for thumb controls here? Is this something you could do with those gamer keypads?

I was pressing control and alt and shift with my pinky fingers, and that's how I blew out my arm.

I switched to a Kinesis Advantage keyboard and now I have control, alt, hyper, super, backspace, and shift under my left thumb. My right thumb has control, alt, hyper, super, enter, and space.

I don't know anything about gamer keypads, is there one you suggest I investigate?

I’d start with this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaming_keypad

Something in this vein has actually been made quite some time ago: https://www.bltt.org/software/dasher/

I'd put some random keys on the bottom of my seat or wired into the TV remote or the doorbell button of my neighbours. The ordered shape and regular size, position of keys is too much of a burden to mee, constricts my wondering creative mind too much.

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